THE CAKEWALK:

ASTUDY IN STEREOTYPE AND REALITY

"Cakewalk" is the only caption on the 1904 picture postcard. In the center of the
card the artist has drawn a black woman with huge lips, kinky hair, yellow hat,
pink dress, green socks and orange shoes, lifting her skirt as she kicks her legs.
She is flanked by two ludicrously dressed men. One sports a top hat and a green
and yellow striped bathing suit under a red and white striped swallowtail coat. The
other, a high-stepping fellow who carries a cane, is dressed in a straw hat,
oversized red polka-dot bowtie, and mismatched striped pants and shirt.
l
The
impact of this visually strong image is overwhelming.
The overall effect for the modern viewer is most unsettling. In fact, upon
encountering this caricature in 1981, a person unfamiliar with turn-of-the-century
popular culture might think he had discovered the unique creation of an aberrant
mind. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Similar derogatory images proliferated
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and not only on postcards.
Sunday comics, illustrated humor magazines, children's toys, advertising,
lithographs, sheet music covers, stereo cards, product boxes and assorted knick-
knacks all featured stereotyped racial imagery in which blacks stole chickens,
devoured watermelons, wielded razors, picked cotton, gambled, imitated white
dress and speech, smiled widely, and danced and danced and danced.
An 1893 trade card advertising Arbuckle's coffee depicted three
"representative sports and pastimes" of "American Negroes," possum hunting,
banjo playing and cakewalking. The cakewalk couple are elegantly dressed in pink
and green, the woman smiling coyly as her partner struts proudly by. The text on
the back of the card notes that "the American Negro is a child of nature, and one
of the most entertaining, interesting and happy of beings." The cakewalk, danced
by the couple, "fond of display and gorgeous in their choice of colors," is
explained straightforwardly as a "contest to determine the most graceful and best
of walkers," in which couples "pass in serious and sober fashion, to the
accompaniment of music" before judges who award a cake to the most deserving.
Actually, among the many white-drawn renderings of the dance, this is one of the
least caricatured. For, despite the accompanying comments made on the simple,
happy-go-lucky black character, the couple is not drawn in awkward and
exaggerated postures, nor in gaudily mismatched and ill-fitting costumes.
A grotesque rendition of the event was the more common in the 1890's. An
Arm and Hammer Baking Soda trade card gave a most inglorious account of the
cakewalk tradition when it pictured a black maid leading a "bread-walk" of huge-
lipped, bug-eyed "nigs" around a loaf of bread made with their product. And the
manufacturers of "Three Black Kids" cigars placed a picture of two high-
strutting, ragged boys dancing to the accompaniment of a banjo on the inside
cover of each cigar box.
The cakewalk stereotype was not only used to sell, it was used to entertain.
Stereo cards, photographs which could be viewed in three dimension, were a
popular parlor diversion in an age before television, and black subjects a favorite
category of cards. An 1896 card, "Belle of the Cake Walk," pictured a black man

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206 journal of social history
in elaborately flowered drag, posing in a frozen dance position before a
dilapidated shack. Other cards featured black-faced dancers or actual black models
outfitted in the most outlandish costumes imaginable.
Numerous toys also featured black cakewalking characters. A high-kicking
paperdoll was comically resplendant in red and white striped pants and a green
swallowtail coat, while a white-gloved dancer with spats and cane danced across
the side of a tin noise-maker. And a board game, "The Cakewalk Game,"
featured on its cover a parade of couples dressed in a rainbow array of colors (one
man wears an orange-checked suit with blue cumberbund and red tie!).
Cakewalking "darkies" even decorated the walls of turn-of-the-century
American homes. Currier and Ives, the New York firm whose famed, cheap
lithographs catered to the popular tastes of millions of nineteenth-century
Americans, in 1883 published "De Cakewalk" as one of their dozens of comic
black subjects. And twenty years later, as testimony to the fact that popular
interest in the topic had not waned, the Prang Lithographic Company printed a
lush chromolithograph of a couple about to receive the prize cake.
Twentieth-century Americans in the age of inventions were not content,
however, to rely solely on drawings for their entertainment. In 1903 the American
Mutoscope and Biograph Company released three film shorts featuring the
cakewalk. Each of these pioneering, silent motion pictures is less than one minute
long, but together they reveal much about what their audience knew of the
dance.
2
In "The Cakewalk," a black man in formal attire and beribboned cane leads two
couples in the march. Both women wear proper, long, dark-colored dresses; the
men, dark tails. Their movements are strutting, but "dignified." Considering the
times in which it was filmed, this movie is remarkably understated in nature. It
indicates that alternative views of the cakewalk were available for consideration;
however, in this case, that alternative view may have existed only as a foil to the
more flamboyant one. For the film's companion piece, "The Comedy Cakewalk,"
depicts the dance in far greater accordance with the prevailing stereotype. This
movie also features a leader and two couples, but now the women wear floral hats
and flashy, mid-calf length dresses of striped silk, and one of the men wears a
white duster coat and white top hat. The women raise their skirts as they strut by
in much more animated fashion, and the leader stops the march at one point to do
a Charleston-type step. These actions, of course, seem all the more "eccentric"
when contrasted with the first film. "The Ballyhoo Cakewalk," except that it had
a much larger cast of characters, was a recapitulation of the comedy walk both in
costuming and action.
The same company produced a film in 1907 entitled "Fights of Nations."3 This
movie was a veritable catalog of racial and ethnic stereotypes, depicting fights
among knife-carrying Mexicans, money-hungry Jews, heroic Scots, and drunken
Irishmen. The black segment, "Sunny Africa - 8th Ave., New York," pictures a
razor-slashing fight over a girl which temporarily interrupts a spirited cakewalk in
a black dance hall. This placed the dance squarely within a whole set of
stereotypes. Interesting also to those who note today that all American minorities
have suffered at the hands of caricaturists, is the film's finale, "America - Land
of the Free," in which the ethnic characters from all the previous vignettes join
whites at a military ball to rally around Uncle Sam and make up - all, that is,
except the blacks.
Besides the obvious fact that the moving picture was the ideal medium for
portraying an activity which depended so much on motion, caricaturists had

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THE CAKEWALK
207
another reason for wanting to capture the cakewalk and every stereotype on film.
Photography lends an air of realism to what it shows; that which it pictures is more
believable as "real life" than that which the cartoonist draws. This was not only
true of movies, but of photographic postcards. Representative of these many cards
is one captioned "Typical Negro Cakewalk." Among the six couples posing as if
frozen in mid-step are a man dressed in an orange and yellow ragland coat, and a
woman in a gaudy pink and blue dress with pink stockings. The caption implies
that this is a documentary shot of an authentic black gathering; the greater
possibility that it was an elaborately staged and costumed production directed by
whites is never mentioned.
Photography by no means replaced artist-drawn renditions, however. "The
Cake Walk" was the title for numerous comic postcards, including one which
featured a real gramophone record of the dance and a group portrait of a whole
cast of stock black characters: a banjo player, a boy eating watermelon, a pair of
lovers, and a gayly dressed cakewalk couple. It was even the subject for postal
holiday greeting cards. One extending "Hearty Christmas Wishes" pictured a
ludicrously dressed black man strutting alongside four dogs who mimicked his
steps on their hind legs. And a Valentine card featured a man in a green knickers
suit, monocle and sunflower bouttoniere, declaring to his lady love, "Ef yo' will
only be rna wife, We'll dance a cakewalk all troo life."
Whatever the popular medium, be it a magazine ad proclaiming that Knox's
gelatine takes the cake, or a postcard souvenir of the cakewalk on the Atlantic City
boardwalk, the purpose of the caricature was the same, to portray cakewalking
blacks as buffoons who could never take that final step, no matter how high-
kicking, into white culture and high society. But only the most superficial analysis
of a stereotype would begin and end with the obvious observation that it afforded
one group the chance to laugh at the "inferiority" of another. Closer analysis
demands more questions be asked. Why, of all the activities in which blacks
engaged, was cakewalking chosen as. the subject of caricature? What did this
particular stereotype allow caricaturists to imply about blacks that distorting other
aspects of their life would not?
Researchers have not yet pinpointed the origin of the cakewalk, but most
believe that it began several decades before its widespread popularity among
whites and concomitant stereotyping in white popular culture, in the slave
quarters of Southern plantations. Because antebellum slave narratives were
produced largely for their abolitionist propoganda value, they concentrated on the
negative aspects of slave life and devoted little attention to slave culture. Thus,
though several mention Christmas festivities and corn-shucking parties, few go
into detailed descriptions of the types of music and dances employed. It is not
surprising, therefore, that the cakewalk is not specifically mentioned. However,
when the researchers of the Federal Writers' Project of the W.P.A. interviewed
aged ex-slaves in the 1930's, there was no longer any need to suppress
information about the happier moments of slave life. Blacks could now reveal that
in spite of living under a system of repression and control unequalled in history,
they had retained a rich and vital culture. And in their reports, the cakewalk is
present.
Louise Jones, an ex-slave from Virginia, reminisced about Christmas: "de
music, de fiddles an' de banjos, de Jews harp, an' all dem other things. Sech
dancin' you never did see befo. Slaves would set de flo' in turns, an' do de
cakewalk mos' all night."4 Georgia Baker, an eighty-seven year old ex-slave from
Georgia, told her interviewer that "Marse Allen" used to sing this song to the

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208 journal of social history
slave children: "Walk light ladies, De cake's all dough; You needn't mind de
weather, If de wind don't blow." She then laughed and added, "Us didn't know
when he was singin' dat tune to us chillun dat when us growed up us would be
cakewalkin' to de same song."5 But Estella Jones, another Georgia ex-slave, gave
the WPA collection's most elaborate description:
Cakewalkin' wuz a lot of fun durin' slavery time. Dey swept de yards real clean and
set benches for de party. Banjos wuz used for music makin'. De womens wor long,
rumed dresses wid hoops in 'em and de mens had on high hats, long split-tailed coats,
and some of em used walkin' sticks. De couple dat danced best got a prize. Sometimes
de slave owners come to dese parties 'cause dey enjoyed watchin' de dance, and dey
'cided who danced de best. Most parties durin' slavery time, wuz give on Saturday
night durin' work seasons, but durin' winter dey wuz give on most any night.
6
Other ex-slaves related their memories independent of the WPA project. A
South Carolinian told of Griffin, a fiddler who played for the dances of the whites
as well as for the "annual cakewalks of his own people."7 Some handed down
their stories in the Afro-American oral tradition to their children or to other
members of the next generation. In 1960 Leigh Whipple, an eighty year old black
actor, related such a story told him in 1901 by a seventy year old woman who had
been his childhood nurse. She explained that she was still in such good condition
because her abilities as a "strut girl" had won her an easier life than that enjoyed
by most slaves. At her first plantation her master watched her cakewalking for idle
pleasure:
Us slaves watched white folks' parties where the guests danced a minuet and then
paraded in a grand march, with the ladies and gentlemen going different ways and
then meeting again, arm in arm, and marching down the center together. Then we'd
do it, too, but we used to mock em, every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it,
but they seemed to like it; I guess they thought we couldn't dance any better.
But her second master recognized her "value" as a dancer; he entered her and a
partner in contests and wagered on them. When she won, she received presents
and special privileges.
8
In 1950, Shephard Edmonds, an ex-ragtime entertainer,
passed on the memories of the cakewalk in antebellum Tennessee which his freed
slave parents had passed down to him:
. . . the cakewalk was originally a plantation dance, just a happy movement they did
to the banjo music because they couldn't stand still. It was generally on Sundays,
when there was little work, that the slaves both young and old would dress up in
hand-me-down finery to do a high-kicking, prancing walk-around. They did a take-ofT
on the high manners of the white folks in the 'big-house,' but their masters, who
gathered around to watch the fun, missed the point. It's supposed to be that the
custom of a prize s ~ r t e d with the master giving a cake to the couple that did the
proudest movement.
The last two stories demonstrate that the purpose of oral lore is to inform the
next generation not only of cultural forms, but also, and more importantly, of the
meanings behind them. Unlike the sheer physical descriptions of the dance
offered by the ex-slaves to white WPA interviewers, both of these stories told to
younger blacks also imparted the message that the cakewalk was more than a
recreational dance; it was an outlet for satirizing the manners of the whites who
oppressed them. Both also related with some satisfaction that those whites who
thought themselves superior to their slaves were so stupid that instead of
recognizing the satire aimed at them, they became unwitting champions of it.
This white belief, that black dance was a sincere, though not completely

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THE CAKEWALK 209
successful emulation of "higher" white cultural forms, characterized an early
caricatured portrayal of "A New Year's Day Contraband Ball at Vicksburg,
Mississippi." In 1863 Harper's Weekly woodcut pictured a hall crowded with
dancing slaves, who ranged from fat, bandana'd mammies and ragged farmhands
to finely dressed belles and dandy dudes. The facial features of some were grossly
caricatured, while others were sympathetically drawn. The caption explained the
wide range of characterization:
The negroes preserve all their African fondness for music and dancing, and in the
modified form which they have assumed here have given rise to negro dancing and
melodies in our theatres, a form of amusement which has enriched many. But the
colored people should be seen in one of their own balls to enjoy the reality. The
character of the music and the dance; the strange gradation of colors, from the sooty
black of the pure breed to those creatures, fair and beautiful, whose position among
their darker brethren shows the brutal cruelty of their male ancestors for generations,
who begot them to degrade them, and who had thus for years been putting white
blood into slavery. There is in these balls one thing which cannot fail to impress any
observer. Coming as they all do from a degraded and oppressed class, the negroes
assume nevertheless, in their intercourse with each other, as far as they can, the
manners and language of the best classes in society. There is often a grotesque
exaggeration, indeed; but there is an appreciation of refinement and an endeavor to
attain it which we seldom see in the same class ofwhites.
IO
The point of the whole scene was to show the blacks' "primitive appreciation" of
white culture, which resulted in their "grotesquely exaggerated" version of it in
imitative dancing. Incidental was the satirist's more astute observation that
something of black culture, something potentially enriching, was retained in the
scene, also.
This Civil War era caricature is a rare example of contemporary white
commentary on slave dancing outside of a minstrel setting. The scarcity of white
planters' and travellers' accounts of antebellum cakewalking can be attributed to
the same reasons that no secular slave music received much attention. Lawrence
Levine, in his brilliant study of Afro-American folk thought, Black Culture and
Black Consciousness, suggests the possibility that many white observers of slave
society were either unaware of songs which blacks knew enough to keep to
themselves, or unwilling to record that which didn't fit into their preconceived
notions of black culture. I I Seemingly innocent spirituals, not songs of satiric and
protesting social commentary, were what they believed blacks thus,
they were what they heard and recorded.
Not only did antebellum white observers ignore the lyrics of secular slave
they also paid insufficient attention to the style of the music and the steps
danced to it. Almost all secondary sources on slave music rely heavily on the 1820
travel account of Benjamin Latrobe, who vividly described the African dances
performed in the New Orleans Place Congo, because few other accounts which
give such attention to detail exist. Most observers were content to note that the
blacks did African dances, or danced "wildly." They shared the ethnocentric
belief that, unlike Europeans whose culture had a form and style which
differentiated a quadrille from a waltz, Africans were cultureless and only engaged
in formless, irrational, barbaric behavior. Thus, they reasoned, all black dances
were alike and needed no further description than "wild."
Even later black narratives are not as rich a source of information on slavery-era
cakewalking as one would hope or might expect. The few descriptions cited earlier
are not a selective sampling but an almost exhaustive compilation of those
accounts which have been found so far. This lack of reportage, less

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210 journal of social history
understandable than that among abolitionist slave narrators and ethnocentric
white observers, most likely had two major causes. First, the WPA "informants"
probably realized that these interviews gathered by government agents would be
directed mainly to a white audience. And, as folklorists long ago discovered, there
is a reluctance among people to share the secrets of their culture with strange data-
collectors. Second, many of the WPA interviewers (most of whom were not
trained folklorists) shared the same assumptions antebellum white observers
held. When "informants" reported that slaves sang spirituals, interviewers often
asked follow-up questions: "Could you sing one for me?" But when told that
slaves held parties and danced all night, most simply went on to the next topic.
The interviewers willingly believed that slaves could express a child-like faith in
the white Christian God (whites had not yet guessed at the hidden-revolutionary
meanings of spirituals), but they could not conceive of blacks participating in a
rich cultural life independent of European forms. Thus, they felt no need to press
the ex-slaves for further explanations of remarks which hinted that such a culture
indeed existed.
This dearth of information on the origin and form of the cakewalk in its folk
setting (before it became distorted on the minstrel stage) does not mean,
however, that modern scholars have been unable to analyze its component parts
and its possible African roots. Indeed, Lawrence Levine is on firm ground when
he asserts that there is "a wealth of evidence to buttress Herskovitz' assertion that
the dance 'carried over into the New World to a greater degree than almost any
other trait of African culture.' "12
Anthropologist Harold Courlander, in noting that the strut was a dance motif
drawn from the black and not European tradition, reported that in the "secular
dances of South Africa, Ghana, and Nigeria," he himself had observed "certain
passages which were virtually indistinguishable from what in this country go by
the name of the Cake Walk, Shuffie, and Strut."13 Musicologists William Schafer
and Johannes Reidel have traced the cakewalk's characteristic "Polyrhythmic
structure" to African music, in which this is an "outstanding feature."14 John
Roberts also keys on the common rhythmic structure of the two musics in noting
that the cakewalk's basic syncopated rhythm of Fn n in the right hand set
against the steady "oompah" in the left, is directly traceable to African styles. IS
Ragtime expert Rudi Blesh also calls attention to the fact that right handed
syncopation against a "regularly accented bass" is a commonplace of both African
music and plantation "folk melodies." 16
And jazz historian Marshall Stearns returns to observations of the dance steps
to make the same connection. He links the cakewalk to the Southern Ring Shout,
which he in turn traces back to the African Circle Dance. He explains that this
African dance became adapted to its American setting to become a truly Afro-
American form. Its characteristic African shuffie step, he argues, was supplanted
by the strut because of the satiric purpose of "taking otr' on the grand, strutting
manners of the whites.
17
What Stearns and most other authors who mention the satiric element of the
cakewalk fail to note, however, is that satire, or signifying, is itself a characteristic
trait of black music. Few show adequate appreciation for satire as a cultural trait
which gives black music a dimension beyond its rhythm. In Ishmael Reed's 1972
novel, Mumbo Jumbo, itself a sparkling example of black satire, Reed describes the
phenomena of the "Roaring Twenties" as an outbreak of "Jes Grew." Jes Grew
is an "anti-plague" which causes blacks first, and then others, to manifest their
true nature. Its principal symptom is spontaneous dancing. At one point Reed

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THE CAKEWALK 211
pauses to reflect: "Don't ask me how to catch Jes Grew. Ask Louis Armstrong,
Bessie Smith ... Ask the dazzling parodying punning mischievous pre-Joycean
style-play of your Cakewalking your Calinda your Minstrelsy give-and-take of the
ultra-absurd." Ishmael Reed appreciates the signifying element of the
Cakewalk.
18
Another trait that several slave accounts of the cakewalk mention is its contest-
element. This in turn points to its essentially improvisatory nature and
characteristic of responsoriality. Schafer goes so far as to label the cakewalk "a
grand promenade with improvisatory possibilities." 19 Stearns explains the
relationship between contest and improvisation by noting that "in competition
stress is placed on individual invention. "20 But no authors point out how the way
the contest was decided exhibited the trait of responsoriality. Several accounts of
contests, during and after slavery, indicate that the audience shouted support for
any couple displaying unusual inventiveness or elegant execution. This cued them
and the other couples as to how to dance in order to win the favor of the judges,
often the audience members themselves. There was a constant give and take, call
and response, between dancer and viewer that is but another essential
characteristic of black music.
Thus, the cakewalk can be identified as an Afro- American folk form with roots
in African music through its traits of syncopation or supsended beat,
polyrhythmic structure, signifying, improvisation, and responsoriality. All
combine to make it a genuinely black cultural product, which is exactly why
whites, from the beginning, attempted to coopt and stereotype it.
When two groups with conflicting interests and differing cultures (in this case,
racially stratified blacks and whites in nineteenth and twentieth-century America)
are forced to coexist within a larger society, it is not unusual for the more powerful
group to try to impose its values and culture on the whole community. For, the
presence of viable cultural alternatives among those they label as inferior provides
evidence which threatens to shatter their carefully but precariously constructed
social definition of reality, a definition which justifies their domination and self-
interested rule. If blacks are, indeed, inferior and cultureless, the reasoning goes,
whites are justified, even duty-bound, to rule them with an iron and "guiding"
hand. But, if they are, instead, intellectually and morally equal and capable of
creative thought, the justification is removed.
Dance was a prominent cultural strength of blacks, the cakewalk a particularly
distinctive example of it, whose purpose was, after all, to satirize the competing
culture of supposedly "superior" whites. Slaveholders were able to dismiss its
threat in their own minds by considering it as a simple performance which existed
merely for their own pleasure. To coopt the cakewalk, physically seize control of
it, was within the power of whites who "owned" the blacks with whom they lived.
(Of course, it continued to be danced surreptitiously by slaves who retained its
mocking nature, also; but, what slaveholders didn't know about didn't worry
them.) And, as previously noted, knowledge of the cakewalk was restricted largely
to these Southern plantations in the antebellum period.
As blackfaced minstrelsy developed in the postbellum period from its four-man
origins to lavish and finally, mammoth, productions, the cakewalk appeared to a
wider audience, but now in the guise of the walkaround finale. Rourke, in her
classic study of American Humor, noted that this "minstrel climax of competitive
dancing was clearly patterned on plantation dances which went back to Africa. "21
Some minstrel-like performances evidently did strive for authenticity, such as the
exhibit presented at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, in which a plantation scene

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212 journal of social history
was recreated for blacks who sang folk songs and did an old dance called the
"chalk-line walk" or cakewalk.
22
But more representative was the "Black
America" show, an extravaganza with a cast of five hundred which was staged in a
Brooklyn park in the summer of 1895. The difference was, that while this show
also claimed to be a "realistic ethnological exhibit," it was actually a stereotyped
piece in the steadily deteriorating minstrel tradition. The abolition of slavery may
have halted whites from seizing actual control of black cultural forms, but it did
not deter them from recreating black life and culture on the white-controlled stage
to conform to their own negative expectations. Robert Toll designates this
"ultimate in white fantasies about the Southern Negro" as symbolic of the "final
culmination of the minstrel show." It included a scene in which the entire cast
descended on a watermelon cart to devour its contents. The first part of the show
concluded with a cakewalk which the program claimed was not a predetermined
performance. It explained the plantation history of the dance, then instructed the
audience to select the victors by shouting out their favorite couple's number. The
performers responded to this shouting by increasing the pace Of the dance.
23
This curious mixture of caricature and authentic dance characterized the
tension which underlay all minstrelsy. As Schafer states, "minstrelsy was both
racist and a way to marginally bring black music to white America. "24 It at once
presented actual black music and poked fun at it by labelling it "peregrination for
the pastry." Postbellum white caricaturists substituted denial and denigration of
black culture for their race's lost license to control it. Minstrelsy misrepresented
this black creative form, while at the same time making white people in small
towns all over America aware that any black culture existed at all.
In most later shows, blacks were employed to do the dance which whites could
never seem to master with equal style and v e r v e ~ however, many cakewalkers
were whites in blackface. A typical blackface farce was "Jes Like White Folks," in
which a black girl with "aristocratic ideas" gets the notion to hold a fancy party
highlighted by a possum walk. After cajoling her rowdy guests into a "proper"
contest, she discovers that her brother has stolen and eaten the prize possum. The
scene ends in pandemonium.
25
Imamu Baraka has commented on such farcical
presentations of the cakewalk, "If it is a Negro dance caricaturing white customs,
what is that dance when a white theatre company tries to satirize it as a Negro
dance? I find the idea of white minstrels in blackface satirizing a dance satirizing
themselves a remarkable kind ofirony."26
All in all, the relationship that was cultivated between the cakewalk, minstrelsy
and the coon song was an exceedingly uneasy one. Coon songs, later to be
adopted by ragtime, grafted caricatured titles and lyrics onto cakewalk music to
create a most curious hybrid, including such songs as "Rastus on Parade," "De
Darkey Cavaliers," and "Kullud Koons' Kake Walk."
This was to be expected of white hack writers and greedy music distributors, but
even serious black ragtime composers were "stuck" with images inherited from
the minstrel stage. Schafer and others have tried to demonstrate that though these
black writers, from economic necessity, continued the familiar grotesque images,
they gradually mediated and humanized them.
27
In some cases, as with Bert
Williams' "Nobody," this is undoubtably true. But in other songs this argument
is, at best, tenuous. Blesh takes this argument to its extreme in an apologia for
Ernest Hogan's "All Coons Look Alike to Me," which does not stand up to a
critical reading of the text. 28 Indeed, Hogan himself repeatedly expressed regret
for writing this song in later life.
Perhaps even worse than the titles and lyrics of these songs were the

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THE CAKEWALK 213
illustrations on their sheet music covers. The characters featured on Hogan's
infamous hit were bug-eyed, blubber-lipped dandies sporting checked sports coats
and diamond lapel pins. "The Coon's Trademark: A Watermelon, Razor,
Chicken and a Coon," a hit performed by Williams and Walker, had on its cover
drawings of all these familiar and derogatory stereotypes. These images appealed
to a racist buying public, and enticed them to purchase the music.
This is not to suggest, however, that the music itself went unnoticed and
unappreciated. On the contrary, it was infectiously popular. Through the
composition of rags, Schafer asserts, "blacks seized control of the image of blacks
in popular music." Amidst the "verbal idiocy" of racist lyrics, "there arose a
strain of vital and clear black music of great nobility and power. "29 Whites had
their stereotyped images of blacks visually and verbally confirmed, but aurally
shattered. This ever present duality in ragtime cakewalk music, according to
Blesh, allowed blacks to "project ragtime rhythms into the public consciousness
through the medium of the coon song. "30 Judging by the thousands of songs
which were produced, the public consciousness was saturated.
The tensions of this duality could play havoc with the careers and artistic
temperaments of black artists who had to deal with the music every day.
Comedian, coon song singer, and cakewalk virtuouso Bert Williams, for instance,
had to conform to theatrical conventions of the black in order to obtain work; but,
according to his biographer, Ann Charters, those same conventions "crippled his
talent and limited his achievement." Though at times he transcended the
stereotypes which his audience expected him to portray, at most times it would
have been more "impossible for him to escape these stereotypes than to fly. "31
Nowhere is the duality better illustrated, however, than in the partnership of
Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Cook wrote the music and Dunbar
the lyrics for the 1898 black musical, "Clorindy: the Origin of the Cakewalk." For
Dunbar the project was a lowpoint in a career already plagued by demands to
conform to stereotypes. Dunbar was embarrassed by his lyrics, which were in the
worst minstrel tradition. Despairing at the contribution he'd made to the
stereotyping of his own race, he vowed never to write such lyrics again (a vow he
didn't keep) .32
However, Cook's reaction to the opening performance reveals no such
disappointment or shame. And, indeed, from his perspective, there was no need
for remorse. Margaret Butcher wrote that "Clorindy, ahead of its time, hinted at
the symphonic development of Negro syncopation and harmony not to be fully
developed for ten to fifteen years."33 And James Weldon Johnson praised Cook's
music for its "musicianly treatment ofragtime."34 The sixty minute show, with a
twenty minute cakewalk finale, was a huge success; and Cook's music was worthy
of its folk origins. His exuberant reaction, therefore, is understandable: "My
chorus sang like Russians, dancing meanwhile like Negroes, and cakewalking like
angels, black angels! "35 The music brought prideful joy to its composer, despair to
its lyricist. Audiences may have perceived the cakewalk as a simple pleasure, but
to black writers and performers it remained a sometimes joyous and triumphant,
and sometimes compromising and painful, enigma.
The retention of the contest element in what had become a performance piece,
also added to the enigmatic quality of the dance. As in the 1895 "Black America"
pageant, in many shows paid performers actually engaged in a contest. From the
reminiscences of ex-dancers, it becomes apparent that these contests were not
fixed, that competition with its accompanying traits of improvisation and
responsoriality actually did take place. Stearns interviewed several dancers who

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214 journal of social history
gave this impression. "Rubberlegs" Williams, ajazz dancer who worked in a 1922
carnival plantation show, remembered that he "worked up a strut, and won the
cake most of the time." Nettie Compton, who was a specialty cakewalk performer
in an otherwise all white circus, in 1902, remembered that the male contestants
improvised fancy tap and acrobatic steps in order to win. "Slow Kid" Thompson,
who had been a cook in a Shreveport circus, doubled as a cakewalker as did the
rest of the black kitchen help.36 In a white carnival atmosphere alien to the folk
settings of this black dance, managers felt a need to add these touches of
authenticity. Yet, as if to neutralize this authenticity, they costumed and
presented their cakewalkers as a troupe of clowns.
The cakewalk contest became such a popular part of minstrel shows and musical
revues that promoters took it off the professional stage and into the amateur
tournament. Cakewalk contests popped up nationwide. These contests, 'n turn,
fed back into the professional shows, with victors sometimes winning vaudeville
bookings. In 1892 the first annual national championship, or Cakewalk Jubilee,
was held at Madison Square Garden, featuring fifty finalist couples who had won
local competitions. Such contests were going concerns, charging admission for
viewers and offering prizes as lucrative as $250. Angry black contestants in 1897
tried to have police arrest the management of the Jubilee for racially prejudiced
judging.
37
They were, of course, unsuccessful, but their ire shows the level of
emotion that was invested in the cakewalk. Some contestants who travelled from
contest to contest established reputations which rivalled those of paid performers.
In 1899 the song, '''Doc' Brown's Cake Walk," celebrated the fame of a Kansas
City black man who claimed to be the undefeated champion of these contests. The
sheet music cover told "Doc's" story beneath a photo of him in cakewalk attire.
38
On the ragtime stage certain performers also became known as cakewalk
virtuousos. No major black musical or revue could succeed without a cakewalk
number. Charles Johnson and Dora Dean's strobe-lighted staging and stylish
dancing brought critical acclaim from the white press and inspired Williams and
Walker to write the hit tune, "Dora Dean." Black Patti's Troubadours show
combined operatic medleys with comic cakewalk numbers. The cakewalk
sequence ended in the same razor-slashing pandemonium which had been
"interrupting" the walkaround finales of minstrel farces for decades.
39
The
Whitman Sisters troupe performed the dance on the black vaudeville circuit, while
the vaudeville team of Harrigan and Hart had inserted "Walking for dat Cake, an
Exquisite Picture of Negro Life and Customs" into their otherwise all-white show
as early as 1877.
40
And no Uncle Tom's Cabin troupe was considered complete
without cakewalkers in gaudy costumes.
41
However, it was with the comedy song and dance team of Bert Williams and
George Walker that the cakewalk became most closely identified. Their act, which
employed a drum-major cakewalk leader and seven parading couples, featured
Walker's grace as a dancer and Williams' comic, feigned bumbling attempts to
imitate the steps of the others. By 1898 their names were so synonymous with
cakewalking that the American Tobacco Company decided to exploit the
association by hiring the pair to pose for cigarette ads.
42
The color photographs,
which depict them in cakewalk postures and dandy dress (Walker wears a full-
length gold coat, spats, and a red and white striped vest), were used not only in
the ads, but in a series of postcards and on various sheet music covers.
The dance became so popular at the turn-of-the-century that it spilled over into
white and even European society. At a time which has been described as the nadir
of white American attitudes toward blacks - in an age of racist polemics,

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THE CAKEWALK 215
lynchings, and disenfranchisement - a black dance became the rage of white
society. An editorial in the 1899 Musical Courier spoke out vehemently against
this situation, declaring:
Society has decreed that ragtime and cakewalking are the thing, and one reads with
amazement and disgust of historical and aiistocratic names joining in this sex dance,
for the Cakewalk is nothing but an African danse du ventre, a milder edition of
African orgies.
43
But this response was, by its own admission, atypical. For example, one of the
"historical and aristocratic names" to which it undoubtably referred was William
K. Vanderbilt, who had hired the black dancer, Tom Fletcher, to teach him the
cakewalk. Vanderbilt gained some notoriety for this on his own, by displaying his
newly acquired talents at an exhibition. But public attention was truly drawn to his
terpsichorean activities when Williams and Walker made them the focus of a
publicity stunt. The duo hand-delivered a letter to Vanderbilt's door, complaining
of his exhibitionism and challenging him to a contest to determine the true
cakewalk champion. Vanderbilt never responded, but the pair's point was made.
44
And it is the point of their challenge which elevates this incident above that of a
humorous historical footnote, and makes it instead a key clue in understanding
why the black cakewalk became a white fad. When Williams and Walker accused
Vanderbilt of "having posed as an expert" on the cakewalk, thereby "distracting
attention from [them]," they were challenging much more than one white
dilletante's right to cut into their livelihood. They were attacking the white race's
attempted ultimate usurpation of this black cultural form.
The cakewalk had not cast a spell over thousands of negro-phobes, transforming
them into toe-tapping negrophiles. On the contrary, by 1898 white popular culture
had so denigrated the image of the black cakewalker, and so infiltrated itself into
the production of ragtime music, that white society was convinced that the dance
was now its rightful province. White America, confident of its racial superiority
and attracted by the rhythm and spectacle of the cakewalk, concluded in its self-
appointed role as cultural arbiter for the whole society, that whites could best carry
on the cakewalk tradition.
White song-writers such as Holzmann and Mills, motivated by the lure of fame
and wealth, contributed some of the best known rags of the era. As trained
musicians, they applied the cakewalk formula in writing new tunes. But, as
Margaret Butcher has noted, many white rags were "thin, superficial uses of
ragtime's rhythmic and harmonic idiom."45 For most white writers of ragtime,
the music was not a folk form to be adapted to the needs of a new age, but an
object to be "commercially exploited." The assessment of the modern scholar is
exemplified by Schafer, who wrote that though most ears couldn't tell the
difference between art and commercial rag, the "pseudo-rag" was a "debased"
form "which abandoned [cakewalk] rhythms and march structure for chaotic
parades of arpeggios and trick fingering. "46
Even John Phillip Sousa got into the act. Sousa, among the first bandleaders to
recognize the adaptability of the march-like cakewalk to performance by brass
bands, featured cakewalk syncopation in his 1900 performance at the Paris
Exposition and the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Ironically, no black rags were
played at St. Louis, only white, diluted forms. The cakewalk was so successful for
Sousa that he even advertised for composers to submit new songs to him.
47
And,
in 1908, Debussy demonstrated his and Europe's appreciation for the music by
composing "The Golliwog's Cakewalk, "48 (The Golliwog is a black doll-like
creature popular in Europe.)

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216 journal of social history
However, these plans to seize control of the cakewalk from blacks hit some
snags. Black performers remained the dancers really in demand, and still had to be
imported into white shows. And while racist lyrics abounded, it was black-
composed tunes which were whistled and danced to all over America. Margaret
Butcher has written, "the appeal was not in what was said, but in the rhythm and
swing. "49 Blacks continued to make America aware of the power and
attractiveness of their cultural forms, despite white attempts to make it seem that
they were not really black art forms at all. The ultimate usurpation, exclusive
white composition and performance of the cakewalk, was a failure. And, at a time
when the stereotyped view of the black was dependent on the belief that he was
cultureless and incapable of artistic creation, this was intolerable.
Thus, the burden of proving black racial inferiority was returned to white
caricaturists, who had to make it seem as if black culture had never existed at all.
They attacked the very strengths of the race which threatened to disprove their
stereotypes. Cakewalkers were made to appear ludicrous. Their dance, which
satirized white manners, was presented as a ridiculous and unsuccessful attempt
to emulate white culture. Their dress was depicted as tastelessly gaudy; their
postures, distorted. Instead of projecting grace, caricatured cakewalkers projected
awkwardness. This image was then repeated and repeated and repeated until it
was reinforced in the minds of all those people who bought postcards, sheet
music, stereo cards and toys. Finally, this image supplanted the true one in
American popular culture. It is sad that the memory of the "cakewalk clown" has
lingered on - sadder still that the true history of this folk form has been
forgotten. The time is long overdue that the record be set straight.
Yale University
FOOTNOTES
Brooke Baldwin
1. All postcards and other artifacts described are from the collection of the author.
2. All are located in the film archives of the Library of Congress. "The Cakewalk" and
"Comedy Cakewalk" are on reel FLA 3381, L.C. #367. The "Ballyhoo Cakewalk" is reel
FLA 4107, L.C. #1093.
3. Also located in Library of Congress film archives, reel FLA 5382, L.c. #2412.
4. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture andBlack Consciousness (New York, 1977), 15.
5. George Rawick, The American Slave: Georgia Narratives (Westport, Ct., 1972), part one,
55.
6. ibid., part two, 348.
7. Dena Epstein, Sinful Tunes andSpirituals (Chicago, 1977),211.
8. Marshall Stearns, Jazz Dance (New York, 1968),22.
9. Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime (New York, 1950),96.
10. Harper's Weekly, 1863,337.
11. Levine, Black Culture, 17-18.

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THE CAKEWALK
12. Levine, Black Culture, 16.
13. Harold Courlander, Negro Folk Music (New York, 1963), 202.
217
14. William Schafer and Johannes Riedel, TheArtofRagtime(BatonRouge,La., 1973),75.
15. John Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds (New York, 1972),52, 198.
16. Blesh and Janis, Ragtime, 7.
17. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 123.
18. Ishmael Reed, MumboJumbo (New York, 1972), 174.
19. Schafer and Riedel, Ragtime, 8.
20. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 123.
21. Constance Rourke, American Humor (New York, 1931), 88.
22. Eileen Southern, The Music ofBlack Americans: A History (New York, 1971), 272.
23. Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York,
1974), 2 6 2 - 3 ~ and Southern, op. cit., 274.
24. Schafer and Riedel, Ragtime, 15.
25. c.1. Emms, Jes Like White Folks (Ohio, 1903).
26. Leroi Jones, Blues People (New York, 1963), 86.
27. Schafer, and Riedel, Ragtime, xii, 15-19,24-27.
28. Blesh and Janis, Ragtime, 88-9.
29. Schafer and Riedel, Ragtime, 19,24.
30. Blesh and Janis, Ragtime, 13.
31. Ann Charters, Nobody: The Story ofBert Williams (New York, 1970),81-3.
32. Addison Gayle, Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York, 1971),
87-8.
33. Margaret Butcher, The Negro in American Culture (New York, 1956), 57.
34. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York, 1930), 102-3.
35. Southern, Music, 295.
36. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 70-1.
37. Charters, Nobody, 36.
38. Terry Waldo, This is Ragtime (New York, 1976),38.
39. Charters, Nobody, 35-6.

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218 journal of social history
40. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 78,86, 117-118.
41. Harry BirdofT, The World's Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York, 1947),347-54.
42. Charters, Nobody, 35-6.
43. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 123.
44. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 122; Johnson, Manhattan, 104-5.
45. Butcher, Negro, 57.
46. Schafer and Riedel, Ragtime, 6, 90.
47. Blesh and Janis, Ragtime, 74-5, 100; Stearns, Jazz Dance, 123.
48. Peter Gammond, Scott Joplin and the Ragtime Era (New York, 1975),39.
49. Butcher, Negro, 56.

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